Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the ideal solution for you if yes.
While anybody can claim to be unique nowadays, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.
AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to protecting user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN site begins with an appeal for your trust, mentioning, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anybody can declare to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.
They have actually been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the aid of 2 lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications supplier Iridium formerly ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).
During the last decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger company either.
Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually established or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.
AirVPN takes the non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
How does AirVPN stack up versus its rivals with such strong privacy qualifications?
AirVPN’s Key Features
Servers
AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with only 246 servers spread throughout 23 nations.
Most servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the absence of diversity of servers decreases the number of international AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while keeping their privacy.
That said, Air is well known for its exceptional performance throughout its server network, with lots of nations having high-performance physical individual servers.
They use transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to supply an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no speed constraints or time limits.
To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most reputable and secure method to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.
Numerous ports and protocols are readily available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.
When it boils down to it, no preference is given to any protocol, service, or application. Net Neutrality is maintained. Significantly, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographic constraints, and traffic shaping.
The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it automatically improves users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely trusted. Nevertheless, the lack of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN states it is testing WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol totally in place till a few of its technical and privacy issues are addressed.
AirVPN has actually likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to try out things.
Switching is unlimited, so if you do not like one server, you can easily switch servers as frequently as you like.
You can monitor the present load on each server, any existing problems, and a history of previous problems on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a brand-new tab).
There is a comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the available ports, protocols, DNS server information (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.
All of it is nice, however considering that there is no third-party audit, you need to rely on that what is being used will work. But taking a look at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.
A great feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service before signing up. You do not need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.
Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?
The company is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with defense from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no personal info logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.
AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request this information to be deleted at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.
As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can tell what sort of traffic or protocol you’re using.
There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without worrying about your computer and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.
Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping tactics will fail against AirVPN since your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.
They also state they abide by EU privacy policies and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.
You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that no one can use it to learn who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level security supplied.
If your ISP or nation obstructs OpenVPN, you can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor.
Open-source clients and a lively community forum allow you to get a sense of what current users are stating about the service prior to registering.
All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This means that anyone can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however just ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been inspected by a 3rd party.
Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the very best available. It’s similar to that of some other service providers, but still worth pointing out. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying happens every 60 minutes, and the user can reduce this value. The main data channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.
When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s terrific since it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But know that you won’t have the ability to alter your account’s password if you do not utilize one.
Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence data). But even if the government requested user info, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.
Who Or What Is Eddie??
The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, available on all major platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, despite Eddie’s significant ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those companies who use it as requirement.
Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the information you require to connect to a VPN.
Unfortunately, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use interface, so it might be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.
With Windows, there are a ton of download alternatives. There are builds for various running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to discuss what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most existing does not work on your setup.
After introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest area. You simply click Disconnect when you’re completed. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do so much more because AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.
Two key AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN permits you to connect when your computer system starts up, however you can’t select which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you selected last.
Despite the fact that it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its protected tunnel. Most standard kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, however you can set up the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.
Eddie’s layout is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.
The Overview just displays the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.
The Servers page displays all readily available servers in the network, together with in-depth information about every one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Excellent stuff!
This tab also has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is recommended for you.
The Countries page displays the variety of servers readily available in each country at a glimpse, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also shown. Lots of servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller sized ones have a 100 Mb/s connection.
A green checkmark, a red “X,” and a blank box can be discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a country, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might choose as lots of countries as you like.
If you click the red “x”, that nation will be gotten rid of, successfully making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.
By picking a nation, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and pick the server you desire in a particular country. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated details on ping times and load times.
The Speed tab shows a simple throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.
While a lot of apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained information, such as the server’s location, load, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data uploaded and downloaded, and much more.
Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the information they could ever want about the different locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s an invaluable resource.
Logs is an in-depth record of connections, routes, and other data.
A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This enables you to tweak the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to try an SSH tunnel through more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.
The truly experienced user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.
If the vast function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to find out what specific settings do and how to get the wanted outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.
Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply due to the fact that of its complexity. Remember that the program generally works fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings until you search for them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.
Suppose you do not want to use Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.
How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?
There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application offers the same comprehensive configuration choices as its desktop sibling and valuable status info.
Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and select a specific city on the same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more reasonable, but it’s still quite difficult to comprehend in some spots.
Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than many people will ever need. The software likewise tries a little bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to discuss what each alternative does.
Speeds/Performance
Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN generally connects rapidly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.
Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop alert, and reconnecting us in seconds.
In regards to privacy, leak tests revealed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.
Now let’s get to those speeds.
It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition since AirVPN only supports OpenVPN.
Reviewers have reported speeds to be outstanding. One said there wasn’t a single country where they could complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly remarkable overall.
While it wasn’t quite on top tier for VPNs that utilize WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for the majority of people, and situations like HD video, video gaming, and streaming conferencing certainly won’t slow you down.
What AirVPN does not have is a more comprehensive number of server places. This might restrict the ease of access of close-by servers for some users (which will constantly lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional option for many people in the United States and Europe, but maybe less so for other regions.
Streaming
Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has actually been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.
Indeed, some report that Air is quite bad for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. Nevertheless, it appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.
Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, discovering the ideal server needs prolonged experimentation. This is most likely since, unlike other companies, AirVPN doesn’t use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.
Fortunately, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.
However, streaming is absolutely not an area in which AirVPN excels, just since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.
Does AirVPN Allow P2P?
Yes, it does; every web protocol, consisting of peer-to-peer, is welcome. Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s absolutely nothing to set up, no hoops to leap through. Merely connect to the VPN server of your choice and start.
Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run badly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.
File sharing has decent speeds on regional servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.
AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, activated by default, will obstruct all traffic from leaving your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really convenient, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.
Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be outstanding, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.
AirVPN Plans & Pricing
AirVPN provides a wider variety of plans than a lot of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 devices simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.
This makes it an exceptional choice for individuals who reside in a family home or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.
Pricing varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the same features. Many plans use good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the best offer.
The standard pricing is in Euros. They utilize the European Central Bank to supply real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be easily converted to and paid for in the currency of your option.
The current plans available are:
Three days- EUR2
One month – EUR7
Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month
Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month
One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month
Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month
Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month
AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of international choices are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.
AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and using the coupon code they send you.
There’s likewise a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they have not broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data during that time.
AirVPN Customer Support
AirVPN has a different customer support offering than numerous other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it offers email support and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a very active assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.
Significantly, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced however can be a little irregular with the time it requires to get an action. That stated, the e-mail support is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and helpful, however the detailed answers can be pretty technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.
AirVPN’s site has a great deal of information, including a big FAQs area that is broken up by subject.
AirVPN’s community forums cover various subjects, however beginners will have the very same problems understanding a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.
AirVPN Pros & Cons
Pros:
No logging Whatsoever.
Exceptional speeds with very little loss.
Unrestricted P2P permitted with Port Forwarding.
Strong security on servers and apps alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.
Network Lock/Kill Switch.
Split tunneling.
Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.
Supports Tor over VPN.
Easy app installation and use.
Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.
Strong Customer Support.
Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.
Great prices, especially for longer-term plans.
Optional block lists protect you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and hazardous sources.
Cons:
Only fully supports OpenVPN.
Client app isn’t very user-friendly or attractive like other services.
Client app may overwhelm newer users.
It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.
No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.
Maybe there are a lot of advanced alternatives.
Found in 14-Eyes Country.
Server numbers are relatively low.
Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?
So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with great prices. It’s plainly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. But even new users could do much, much worse.
While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and better results than a lot of its competing VPN competitors.
This VPN service is more focused on safeguarding your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.
It might not ensure the exact same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for consumers who value their personal privacy.
While it does not hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding choice for online filesharing.
Highly recommended!
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